In the past, I’ve said that China still has a (somewhat weakened) totalitarian government, but no longer a communist one. A couple of readers then questioned whether China really is still a totalitarian country at all. I think this is an important issue worth further discussion. As Confucius says, “When the name is improper, what is spoken will not be reasonable. When what is spoken is unreasonable, what is acted upon will not succeed.” (“名不正则言不顺，言不顺则事不成。”)

To start the discussion, here is the Wikipedia definition of totalitarianism:

Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a concept used to describe political systems whereby a state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private life. Totalitarian regimes or movements maintain themselves in political power by means of an official all-embracing ideology and propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that controls the state, personality cults, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of free discussion and criticism, the use of mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror tactics.

When thinking about it according to this definition, an interesting observation emerges: While China still has a political system that is built for all the above totalitarian functions, the party that operates this state apparatus is no longer exercising many of the functions. For example, the tight control over the economy is largely gone in many settings, and the old ideology (communism) is hardly mentioned in propagandas any more. Stupid restrictions on free discussion and criticism still exist, for example the internet blockage and the recent arrest of Liu Xiaobo, but there are also a huge amount of dissenting voices that can be heard on the internet. When it comes to individual life style choices, people are largely left alone. In recent years, there have emerged independent media outlets such as Caijing and the publications of the Southern Media Group. Those things certainly couldn’t have happened in Mao’s time.

Another thing I found very interesting during my recent trip to China is that a growing number of people choose to join other political parties such as the Zhigong Party, either for political participation or self-protection or both. The background of this is the influence and political status of those so-called democratic parties have been, bit by bit, increasing. I met a senior medical doctor in Chongqing who is a member of the Zhigong Party, and he told me a story about a businessman who was wrongly jailed. Fortunately that man was a ranking member of another one of the democratic parties. With the support and appeals from his party, the man regained his freedom. “You need an organization to back you up if you want to fight injustice. One person does not have enough strength,” the doctor told me. “Years ago when I wanted to join the CCP, they didn’t want me. Now they want me, but I no longer what them,” he added with a smile. All together, the many legal democratic parties in China are still not strong enough to match the CCP’s power. “In the local Political Consultative Conference (政协), there may be one third of us and two thirds CCP members, so when taking votes they always win,” the doctor told me, but he was also quick to point out the strength of democratic parties was growing. However, it occurs to me effective political reform is needed to really give these democratic parties, and others that should be allowed to emerge, their due status.

Here is something else I found out: the CCP’s power is fading at base levels of the government and society. In a public work-unit, there are usually two top officials: the administrative official and the Party official (called “the secretary”). Traditionally, the Party secretary dominated the administrative official (who could be a non-CCP member). Nowadays, this remains true at certain higher levels, for example the county level (regiment level in the military) and above. But at lower levels the administrative official now typically holds more power.

The gradual fading of “personality cults” in China is also significant. People of my generation can vividly remember how such a personality cult reached the peak during the Cultural Revolution. After Mao died, there were still strong propaganda campaigns trying to build personality cults for the succeeding leaders Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Zemin, but each time on a reduced scale. Nowadays, you see very little of these attempts at cult building for the current leader Hu Jintao.

So, why does a one-party government that possesses the totalitarian system machine give up operating much of it? There may be many reasons but one, IMO, is due to the progressive trend of civilization world wide. This certainly includes the Chinese people’s wakening to their own rights, ever since the Cultural Revolution ended over three decades ago. Globalization might have brought in many bad things but one good thing – I’ll call it information globalization – has made it much harder to control people and information now than before. This is to say, running counter to the progressive civilization trend increasingly damages the legitimacy of the party’s leadership. Certainly they continue to do things that seem backward, but the boat is still higher when the water is rising.

There are also signs that the central control is increasingly weakened by internal factions within the CCP as well as the effective dispersion of power to sector and local leaders. A recent example is the “empty the cage for new birds” (腾笼换鸟) case. Last October, the party boss of Guangdong Province, Wang Yang, used this term to demonstrate the idea of having new, capital-intensive industries replace the old, labor- intensive industries in Guangdong. As such he took the current economic crisis that closed many of the factories – what he called the “backward productive force” – as a good opportunity. This idea was viewed by his opponents as a selfish localism aimed at getting rid of the large number of migrant workers in Guangdong. And Wang Yang’s idea is not supported by Premier Wen Jiabao, who made a number of speeches to emphasize the importance of supporting small and medium sized private enterprises that provide jobs to migrant workers.

Party factions have always existed in CCP’s history, but they were either consealed from the public or publicized in a violent way. Such a conflict between Wang Yang (a local boss) and Wen Jiabao (the nation’s Premier) to be made public peacefully would have been unthinkable in the old times. Lately, there is also a sign that Hu Jintao supports Wang Yang, which puts the President and the Premier in somewhat opposite positions. Rumor has it that Wang Yang belonged to Hu Jintao’s Youth League faction, while Wen Jiabao is from the State Council clique, so this dispute could be a factional one. Without making a rash judgment on whose arguments make more sense, I must say so far this “cage and bird” debate has been largely rational and non-confrontational from both sides.

To point out the above changes is not to gloss over China’s problems such as government corruption, social injustice, and the lack of independent judiciary. Rather, I see a hope here that a peaceful ongoing improvement in these areas might be possible. Given the significant reduction in China’s totalitarian function and power, could we say that China now has progressed into a semi-totalitarian country from the Mao era of totalitarian? If this holds, and if this first half of the transformation has been made relatively (but not completely) peacefully, isn’t there the possibility that the second half of the transformation, from semi-totalitarian to non-totalitarian, could also be non-violent?

For this I see the increasingly publicized factional disagreement within the CCP as a helpful, and benign, sign. When factions go public, it also points to the hope for possible voting differences within the CCP so that vote of the doctor I spoke of above might really count. That could in turn be the first step toward a more complete democracy.

Of course, there may also be more severe factional conflicts behind the scenes, between the vested interest groups of the “prince party” (太子党) and the unnamed benign force, as the rumor on the street has it. If so, political reform is needed even sooner to prevent something much worse than political backstabbing from happening.

The danger is, the totalitarian state apparatus is still lying there, even if it is semi-inactive. No one can guarantee it will never be activated again by some insane leaders if political reform is not carried out in a timely manner.

by Xujun Eberlein